There are now eleven small orange eyes along my windowsill, and none of them blink at the same time, which I have decided is the most unsettling part. She brought them in coiled around a cardboard spool, a long black cord with these little plastic bulbs spaced along it like beads, and I assumed, reasonably, … Read more
There are three knocks a person can give at a door, and I have sorted all of them. There is the soft, apologetic knock of someone who already suspects they’re not wanted. There is the brisk double-knock of someone with somewhere else to be. And then there is the knock that happened today, which I … Read more
There is a closet in this house I have never once been invited into, and tonight she opened it and pulled out a hard black case I did not know existed, shaped like nothing useful, with a handle worn pale where a hand has gripped it many times before mine ever touched this house. I … Read more
It got dark earlier tonight than it had any business doing, and she turned on the lamp by the window before she turned off the big light, which is a sequence I have never liked and have never been consulted about. The room went soft and yellow in the middle and black at the edges, … Read more
Something happened to the window in the night and I would like it on record that I noticed immediately. Before she was even properly awake. Before the coffee. I was the first one in the house to understand that the glass had changed. It wasn’t broken, exactly. I want to be precise about this because … Read more
It started with one knock. A single, deliberate sound, metal on metal, from inside the radiator in the back room — not the window, not the wall, the radiator itself, as if something had reached up from underneath the floor and rapped its knuckles against the pipe to get my attention. I was sitting nowhere … Read more
I was asleep against her side, which is where I am most nights now, when the wall above the dresser lit up and something long and pale slid across it sideways, stretched itself tall against the corner, and then was gone before I had even finished sitting up. I want to be fair to myself … Read more
She sat down at the kitchen table tonight with a coat across her lap, a small plastic box I have never seen before, and a spool of black thread, and I understood immediately that something was wrong with the coat and she intended to fix it with a weapon. I want to describe the weapon … Read more
I saw the towel before I saw anything else. It was on the counter, draped over something round, and I want it noted that my reaction was not an overreaction. That towel has a history. That towel has, on more than one occasion, meant the end of my claws as I know them, delivered via … Read more
There is a door in this house that has one job, and its job is to be open enough. Not open all the way — I have never asked for that, I am not unreasonable — just open the width of a paw, the width it has always been open, so that I can come … Read more
